Cover

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Even small volumes need friends and this one has had a few. ix
Texas A&M University has provided me with an institutional
home, brilliant colleagues, and energetic students for fifteen
years. The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities
Research at Texas A&M University provided me an internal
leave during which time I finished the first draft of this project
and began another. The Department of European and Classical
Languages and Cultures and the Film Studies Program have
proven to be verdant fields of discussion and exchange.....

Introduction

In the creative offices of Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS),
the network that gave us a talking horse (Mister Ed, 1961–
66), a stranded extraterrestrial (My Favorite Martian, 1963),
and a beautiful domesticated robot (My Living Doll, 1964), it is
not hard to imagine a show pitch like the following: “Hey, what
if we did a comedy about a World War II German POW camp
with a bunch of funny Nazis, where the prisoners are really in
charge of the camp?” The network...

1. Hogan’s Heroes and the Late 1960s America

Hogan’s Heroes premiered in CBS’s Friday night lineup on
September 17, 1965, with the pilot episode, “The Informer.”
The pilot differed from the rest of the run in a number
of significant ways. The pilot episode was shot in black and
white.1 Of course, the pilot episode is also what was used to sell
the network on...

2. Removing the History from World War II

Many stories about the creation of Hogan’s Heroes have
circulated through fan books, websites, and newspapers,
1 yet one version appears authoritative. The creators of
Hogan’s Heroes, Albert Ruddy and Bernard Fein, decided to develop
their own version of a military comedy to compete with
a planned NBC project. This, as I have already demonstrated,
was commonplace programming in the sitcom lineups of the
day. The Campo 44 project,...

3. Hogan’s Heroes and Generational Change

In their book on Hollywood blacklisting and the television
industry, Paul Buhle and David Wagner note the following
of the Hogan’s Heroes writing staff: “One of the industry’s inside
jokes was the antiwar, liberal, and left-wing character of the
series’ writing staff and most of its actors. . . . Dick Powell,...

Conclusion

Hogan’s Heroes may have made no significant contribution
to the understanding of the meaning of World War II.
In fact, I have suggested it was counterproductive to such an
understanding. The series preserves a moment before a more
critical consciousness about the Holocaust and its moral significance
had emerged among the larger public. But the series did
engage, however indirectly, in a conversation about Vietnam. It
lampoons old modes of warfare and a military apparatus that
remains stuck in the past. To be sure,...

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